


Mercy.

by WinterTheWriter



Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who & Related Fandoms, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, Dark, Gen, Happy Ending, If that term is still used, Mentions of child suffering/death, Psychological Torture, The Oncoming Storm, actual torture, casefic, episodic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-02
Updated: 2020-05-02
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:34:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 4
Words: 4,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23956180
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WinterTheWriter/pseuds/WinterTheWriter
Summary: The Doctor is kidnapped by a madman who wants to break her by making her watch as he tortures innocent people. She has no sonic, no TARDIS, no friends, but something she /does/ have?Hope.Really, what more does she need?
Comments: 5
Kudos: 27





	1. Captured.

**Author's Note:**

> Hello all!! Something different from what I usually do. This fic was actually a giant RP Solo for my 13th Doctor account on twitter (DoctorOf_Hope) but I got such great feedback I wanted to post it for a wider audience. Here be the Doctor, morally grey and Big Mad.

One day, the Doctor is captured.

This isn’t unusual.

The “how” or “why” doesn’t much matter - humans always think it does, but it’s the /escape/ that’s important - but soon enough the Doctor finds herself in a dark cell of a room that reeks of sweat and fear, tangy on the tongue. Dark, no - that isn’t right. Pitch black. Black enough that were the Doctor’s hands not bound above her head, she’s certain she wouldn’t be able to see them.

What is unusual, however, is that other than the chafing of thick rope around her wrists and a sore spot on the back of her head, she finds fairly quickly that she’s uninjured. No wetness to indicate blood on any part of her, no stinging of air or fabric against an open wound, not even a twisted ankle. Her sonic’s missing, of course; she can feel the lack of weight in her coat’s pocket, but that’s to be expected.

The light turns on. Squinting and grimacing in the face of it, she blinks rapidly until the figure of a man (humanoid, no - human, definitely human, middle aged, bald on purpose, trimmed goatee) solidifies standing above her, smirking and radiating a smugness that forces her to dislike him immediately.

A shame. This is always more tolerable when she likes her kidnappers.

“Good morning, Sleepy Head,” he purrs, and she fights the urge to roll her eyes. Does scowl at him, though, can’t help that. The Doctor cranes her neck to look around the room and isn’t that wizard? It’s not a cell at all. In front of her but behind this mystery man is a wall of monitors that seem to be /spying/ on cells. Two-way audio going by the standing speaker on the desk before the screens. Security room, then. One exit, thick concrete structure. She doesn’t even see a vent.

“And who might you be?” The Doctor intones groggily. Maybe she /does/ have a minor concussion. She tugs absently at her bindings, finds them quite secure and knotted around a metal loop fixed two meters above her.

“Oh, I’m a fan, Doctor. Yes, I’m quite a big fan.” He crouches down to her eye level with a condescending smile that only widens when she presses herself against the wall for more /distance/. “You won’t know who I am. We’ve never met, unfortunately.”

“Well, let me out of these ropes and we can get a cuppa!”

He laughs. It was worth a shot.

“My name - mm, I don’t think you should know that. I’ll take a page out of your book and choose one! Now let’s see...,” Mystery Man trails off and taps his finger to his chin, makes himself mock “thinking” as much as possible. “Oh! I know! For the sake of this exercise, Doctor, you can call me /Mercy/.”

Something thick and a bit worse than dread rolls in her gut. She smiles at him. “I like that name, Mercy. That’s what I’m all about! Mercy, /forgiveness/.” Hint hint hint, let her go, awful human.

No such luck.

Mercy stands with a flourish and holds his hands behind his back, pacing slowly in front of her. “Oh, but that’s exactly why I chose it! You /are/ all about that, Doctor. You never kill, if you can help it, yes? Murder is the /worst/ of crimes, is it not?”

“...Yes, in a broad—,”

“But what if it wasn’t?” Oh, she /hates/ being interrupted. “What if your idea of /mercy/ isn’t mercy at all? I’ve always wondered that, hearing the stories about you. I’m from the fifth New York, you see - they /love/ you there.”

“Nothing compared to the fifteenth,” she says wryly. So far, this is unimpressive. Obviously he means to connect her to the people in these cells, but he’s taking a rather long time getting to the point. “Who are the folks on the monitors, Mercy? They all look a bit worse for wear.” Are they people she’s spared? Are they victims of the times she’s gone too far?

“Them? Doctor, they’re going to be your...entertainment, shall we say? Yes, we shall.” Mercy laughs to himself as he glances at the screens before waggling his eyebrows at her. “Tell me, Doctor. Tell me your thoughts on murder. I want to hear it from the source herself.”

“...It’s abhorrent. It’s - an unspeakable cruel thing to not only rob someone of their life but of the chance to grow and get /better/. There are so many other options, so /many/, that it should never come to that, no matter the crime you feel someone has committed.” Truthfully, she could talk about that for hours but she’s getting a bit impatient. Nothing like a human man to think he has any true semblance of control over her.

Mercy looks /delighted/ by her answer, though. He even claps his hands together once for good measure before coming to her side and sitting by it, back to the wall, uncomfortably close. Like they’re friends, having a chat. “All these people, Doctor,” he whispers conspiratorially, “are innocent. Completely innocent, completely random. I made sure of that in my plans, because I’ve been planning for /such/ a long time.”

How /obscene/. “And what, exactly, is your /plan/, Mercy?” The Doctor can’t keep the disgust, the bit of rage from her voice.

“I’m going to make you beg me to kill each and every one of them.”


	2. The Plan.

As soon as Mercy swings the heavy door shut on his way out, lock clicking firmly in place, the ropes loosen and fall off her with a /thwunk/. The Doctor rubs absently at the abrasions left behind as she climbs to shaky feet, stumbling for a moment before straightening herself. She takes hesitant, slow steps up to the monitors, and it’s - it’s /horrific/. Every single one shows a person - child, young, middle, elderly - alone, terrified, and in utter agony. The Doctor turns on the audio (one way, just for now) and jolts back at the sheer /sound/ that follows.

In one screen, a woman barely older than Rose screams mindlessly on the metal table that holds her down as visible electric currents wrack her, the thin scrub-like robe she’s in covered in sick and filth. In another, there’s a little boy curled up in the corner, crying in that heartbreaking way only a child can cry as he shakes and trembles. A temperature gauge superimposed on the monitor shows them freezing and warming him before either extreme can kill him. His little fingers are blue, even through the screen. Every screen shows a new victim, and a new torture. Burning, shocking, beating, starving, /everything/ under this sun and many others. But no death. No one has been killed here.

The Doctor is grateful for the waste bucket under the desk as she retches into it.

Okay.

Okay.

Thinkthinkthinkthink. The dumbest thing an enemy can do is leave her alone with her thoughts, so /think/.

She tries the door just to say she did. It, expectedly, doesn’t budge. There’s no slot in it, though, for food or anything, and since he obviously doesn’t want her /dead/ that can only mean he plans to feed her in person.

But she’s not bound now. How can he be sure she won’t fight? To save innocents, to end this horror, she’s not above saying goodbye to pacifism if talking doesn’t work.

Ah, yes. That’s it.

He /wants/ her to talk. And he knows she will. If he’s heard the stories and legends about her, he knows she’ll at least /try/ to talk to him before anything else. Blast. She’s become predictable.

Luckily, predictable to a human isn’t actually predictable at all, not really. They can only see so much coming. Missing the obvious is practically a biological trait.

Now, then, what else? Any hint for how long he plans to keep her here? The security room is definitely a security room, but it’s missing a key thing: there’s no chair.

You know the type! Big, made of black squishy leather, easy to roll around in and lean back on. Nice and comfy, and it’s nowhere to be seen. Definitely on purpose.

He wants her to live, but he wants her to be as uncomfortable as possible. But for how /long/? She got distracted by the chair, forgot that part. It happens.

The Doctor sucks her teeth as she paces a circuit around the small room. Obviously, this is to be a morbid test of her endurance. Not just /her/ endurance, but the endurance of her morals, the code she holds near and dear to her hearts.

So it’ll be a while, then.

What’s his /motive/? No one is ever just /evil/ - if she can find out why he feels the need to do this, maybe she truly /can/ talk some sense into him. Or maybe she’s a fool. That wouldn’t be new either.

Right. Plan.

1\. Find out Mercy’s motive.  
2\. Convince him to set everyone free.  
3\. Fried egg sandwich.

Time to get started.


	3. Patience.

It’s three days before she sees Mercy again. Weak with hunger and rage and exhaustion, sore from sleepless nights on the hard floor, the Doctor barely cracks her eyes open when she hears the lock click. She’s pressed herself into the corner of the room but she’s turned to the monitors - has made it her mission to at least /witness/ the travesties they show if she can’t help them. If they have to suffer, they will not do so alone.

Mercy comes with a boring brown tray with boring brown food and the Doctor doesn’t bother to pretend not to want it. She picks at it as soon as it’s placed in front of her and even goes through the effort of smiling at him for such a treat. “Ooh, this is lovely!” She tells him, voice raspy but still /chipper/, even if it’s the very quite dangerous kind. “Was wondering when you’d show up. Keeping busy out there?”

“Of course. Someone has to keep the show running, after all,” he winks at her. Mercy looks around for a moment and frowns like he’d been hoping to find a chair to sit in for this and the Doctor has to hide a smirk behind her brown piece of bread. “Have you been entertained?”

The smile on the Doctor’s face sours. She clears her throat and takes a deep, private breath before letting herself respond. “That’s not the word I’d use, Mercy. Why are you doing this? What /good/ is any of this doing? What wrong could this possibly be righting for you?”

“Oh, I’m afraid you’re not unlocking my tragic backstory /that/ easily, Doctor,” he laughs, sitting down cross-legged in front of her. The door is open - she /could/ make it, if she gathered the strength - but then what? She doesn’t have enough information to free anyone. Doesn’t have the strength or time to find it on the go. One look at Mercy’s expression proves it - they both know she’s not going anywhere.

Not yet.

The Doctor leans her head back against the wall with a thunk, lets her eyes shut lightly. “You obviously want to talk,” she drawls. “If not about what led you here, then what?”

“I don’t want to talk. This visit is merely marking your progress. Collecting data, if you will. See how close you are.”

“You’re mad if you think I’m ever going to ask you to murder innocent people. I know what you’re going for, and it’s not going to happen. There is /always/ another way.”

Mercy laughs at her again and tuts, shaking his head as he grabs the tray from her hands. She lets him because she’s too weak not to, but she feels tears of frustration prick her eyes as she watches her first meal in days get carried away.

The door locking is almost louder than the screams.

~

The Doctor does what she can with what she has. Mercy visits every three days, and every three days she tries to get him to confess, and every three days she fails. On the other days, she does what she does best - she /talks/. She looks at the empty air and tells it her secrets, pretends it fills her lungs out of kindness. She looks at the monitors and apologizes, over and over and over, and makes promises to boot. She tells stories and sings songs and forces every reserve of hope in every cell of her body to /work/, to make her that beacon of good her friends have always pretended she is.

She sobs with the little boy and screams with the young woman and yells and kicks and cries her /hearts/ out every single time she looks at those monitors, like it’s her own.

The Doctor’s not sure if any of it works, but that’s how it usually goes.

~

“You’re from the fifth New York, right?” The Doctor asks Mercy, three weeks later. She’s weak enough now that she barely moves from the floor, no longer able to pace it. He watches her with something like pity as she lifts a shaking hand to put bread in her mouth.

“That’s right,” he confirms, crossing his arms defensively. Must be getting used to her questioning, starting to expect it.

“They /did/ love me around your time.” She adjusts herself to sit up a bit more, tries to hide the small, excited smile threatening to emerge because she has an /idea/. “After I saved your Emperor, right?”

Mercy grunts in response. Right.

“And they honored me - how did they honor me again?”

“...They outlawed capital punishment entirely. Zero tolerance murder policy, took away all our guns, took away our /military’s/ guns.” Humans. So, so predictable. Not evil for evil’s sake, but evil because he truly thinks that’s /oppression/.

The Doctor smiles softly at him.

“Who did you have to let live, Mercy? Who did you want to die?”

It truly doesn’t matter who, or why. What matters is she /got him/. Motive.

For the first time since her arrival, Mercy hits her. Hard - a sharp jab to her jaw that splits her lip and throbs the bone, rattles her teeth a little, before he slams the door shut behind him on the way out.

She counts it as a win.

~

It’s a bad three days after that. The audio stays on - it always, always stays on now - so her every moment is filled with tormented screams and cries she echoes just as loudly. On the second day, she’s hunched over the desk so her nose almost touches one of the monitors. Namely, the monitor with that little boy, the one who sobs and shakes and begs for his mother as they freeze him to the point of near hypothermia and back again. He’s barely conscious right now, taking wheezing, slow breaths and twitching against the hard floor of his cell.

The /agony/ he’s in. She feels it acutely for him. He’s not - there’s no quality of life here, no spark, no more begging. His eyes are squeezed shut tightly like he’s trying to speed up the process even though they both know his cell’s about to warm up again. But as the Doctor strokes trembling fingers along the cool glass of the screen, she finds herself hoping it gets /colder/.

/Put him out of his misery. Let the child REST/, she thinks, and then hysterically, “Bloody hell, just /die/ already! JustdiejustdiejustDIE!/

/I’m going to make you beg me to kill each and every one of them./ Mercy’s voice in her head makes her rear back from the screen with a loud gasp, stumbling to the floor and quickly embracing her knees to her chest.

Inhale.

Hold.

Exhale.

Repeat.

Horrified tears streak her cheeks as she stares at where she’d been, where she’d wished for the death of a /child/ like that’s all she could do.

Like hell it is.

Time to put her /real/ plan in action.


	4. The Escape.

“The legends say you used to have children, Doctor,” Mercy brings up casually, and she knows /instantly/ that he’s been watching her. Shouldn’t be surprised, probably actually isn’t. She’s not quite sure what she can feel right now.

The Doctor rolls her head weakly to look up at him, eyes half closed. She says nothing.

“They were murdered, were they not?” He asks.

Grief tightens her chest and she clenches her fists in lieu of a response. Don’t give him the satisfaction. Don’t let it be this /easy/.

“Right in front of you! Well, as close to you as they could get. Not quite close enough, from what I’ve heard.” Mercy crouches down in front of her and pushes a lock of her hair from her face. She has no choice but to let him. “Do you think they died instantly, Doctor? Or do you think they had time to wish for it?”

The Doctor opens her mouth and /screams/ wordlessly at him, grief and rage making her shake before she slumps against the floor. Mercy only laughs at the display.

“Do you see now, what I mean? All these people - they /wish/ for death. They want it. Is it not /kinder/ to grant them their wish? Is that not.../mercy/?”

Ugh. He chose that name /just/ to use that line, didn’t he? The Doctor doesn’t bother resisting that eye-roll as she forces herself to catch her breath, hissing in through gritted teeth. They stare at each other for a few tense seconds before - unable to hold it back any longer - the Doctor starts to smile. Slow and sharklike, with that hint of mania she usually pretends is unique to the Master. “Not anymore,” she breathes out roughly.

Mercy glares at her and stands up quickly, towering over her. Power-play. Pathetic. “What do you mean?”

“They.../used/ to want death.” The Doctor sits up properly with a grimace. Adrenaline is already spiking through her. She glances at the monitors - audio on. Two-way. “...Until you got me.”

With a sharp laugh that’s both mocking and worried, somehow, Mercy shakes his head. “Don’t be so egotistical, Doctor. What the hell could /you/ have given them?”

“What I always give people like them. Hope.”

And that’s their cue.

First, the little boy. So weak at first, so small, but stronger and bigger with every syllable. “Do...ctor. Doc...tor. Doctor. Doctor.”

Mercy runs in a panic to the screens and mashes uselessly at the buttons and speakers. Really, locking her in a room with technology? What did he expect? He whirls back to her to yell in her face, “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?!”

Second, the young woman. Her voice is raspy and nearly gone from screaming, but she’s still heard. Whether he likes it or not. “Doctor. Doc..tor. /Doctor/.”

“I did something similar to this a very long while ago,” the Doctor tells Mercy cheerily, watching as he fumbles with a walkie to call for backup. None come. “The last time someone thought he could torment and maim as he pleased just because he locked me away.” The chanting catches on with every victim. In a few of the monitors, Mercy sees that his own men have joined in.

He laughs nervously and turns back around properly to her, scrubbing a hand over his face. “So you got them chanting! So what, huh?! A little mutiny? What do you think that’ll solve?”

“That’s the thing about tyranny, Mercy,” she tells him. “Those under you are only loyal because they’re /afraid/. Hope is, unfortunately for you, the antidote for fear. And I am /chock-full/ of it. All your men needed to know was that I could get them out with a bit of help.” The Doctors nods back to the screens. Each and every cell is being unlocked, every shackle removed. She can barely /contain/ her joy. It lets her get to her feet, her strength returning with every utterance of her name. “Ask me about the chanting.”

“Why—,”

“Well it’s quite simple, really!” The Doctor claps her hands together and /beams/ at him as the halls fill with the sounds of stampeding people who are so very, very /alive/. Just this once, Rose—. “All these weeks I’ve been left alone with a speaker and people who need me. I talked to them, Mercy. I just talked to them. Talked to the guards, walked them through this plan. Answered their questions. And besides giving them hope, well - it also happened to let me form a psychic link with each and every single one.”

“That’s - that’s not possible, since when can you—,”

“You didn’t listen to those stories very well, hmm? Time Lords: we’re better than you.” She winks in the face of his outrage. “There’s power in words, and even more power in hope. I knew I’d be too weak to do this without them.”

Alarms sound through the building from the few guards who didn’t join their cause. Even from where the Doctor is, she can hear that they’re being dealt with. Non-lethally, of course. Mercy yells out at her like she did to him not that long ago and the Doctor meets it with a serene sort of smile as he crumples to his knees. She stands above him, holds her hands behind her back. “There’s one more thing,” she admits quietly, like she’s telling him a secret. “All that pain you put these people through, all that suffering and trauma and agony - the psychic link lets me feel that too. Since my very first day here, I’ve felt each and every thing you’ve inflicted on them.” Leaning down, she tilts her head to meet his eyes. They’re wide and terrified. “The thing is, Mercy, that I can take it. I’ve had far worse done to me over far longer periods of time. You could never hurt me in a way that matters,” the Doctor says softly, “but I can hurt you.”

And with a deep breath, the Doctor puts her hands on Mercy’s temples and forces in /all/ of it. All the freezing, the electrocutions, the burning - every /bit/ of it. She hates the dark part of herself that sings when Mercy screams before he collapses into an agonized wreck choking on sounds.

When the Doctor straightens up, the escapees are all in the doorway. Despite all their horrors and injuries, they all wear hopeful smiles and bright eyes. The little boy is being hugged by that young woman - next to each other the Doctor can instantly tell she’s his mother - and the ex-guards are holding those too wounded to stand. “We found your ship, Doctor,” the little boy says shyly, and after a gentle urging from his mother he rushes towards the Doctor and slowly holds out her sonic.

His mother barely has time to nod her approval before the Doctor is hugging that boy /tight/, uses it to cover how choked up she is. “/Thank you/,” she whispers in his ear. “I am so, so proud of you, you brave little boy.” Pulling back and clearing her throat, she beams at the rest of her new friends. “I’m proud of /all/ of you. Against all odds, beyond all hope, and you lot still banded together for its sake anyways. It would be my pleasure to take you all home, and I’ll treat any and all wounds once we’re on board.”

“Please - /please/-!” Turning around, the Doctor sees her former captor reaching feebly for her from the ground. She crouches to his level. “Oh god, please, make it /stop/, I can’t —,” he sobs heavily, whole body shaking with the force of it. That ugly darkness in her rears its ugly head at the pathetic sight, after /everything/ he’s done.

“The psychic link is broken now,” she tells him, “but I’ve hacked your brain, to put it simply. You’re going to have this pain for the rest of your life.” She wonders, absently, if this is when Donna would have stopped her.

“Wh- no! /No/! Doctor!” He scrambles to clutch her coattails as she stands up but she neatly snatches them away. “Mercy! Mercy, /please!/“

What irony. The man who named himself Mercy to mock the Doctor’s, now begging for that very thing in front of the people he tortured for months on end. Herself included.

The Doctor smiles and lets him live.


End file.
